ePanorama.net has now a Twitter account so you can how follow the news related to this blog and ePanorama.net site in general. Twitter user name you should follow is epanoramanet.
Archive for the ‘WWW dev’ Category
ePanorama.net is now in twitter
Thursday, March 18th, 2010Live DOM Viewer
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010Live DOM Viewer is a nice JavaScript tool for playing with web page DOM (Document Object Model). This JavaScript powered web page shows you four boxes: HTML source editing box, document DOM view, rendered document view and log. The scrip comes with very simple example data, for better testing you can paste your HTML code in or use the code included in more complicated example. I have tested that this page works well in Firefox and Chrome browsers, and it also work with IE (DOM view does not look as good on IE). You can run this web page on the server or it work well from a local file (so you can save the web page on your PC and use it as tool when you need it).
PCRE Cheat Sheet
Monday, February 15th, 2010phpguru.org has a nice PCRE cheat sheet. Take a look at it if you work with PHP.
That cheat sheet is inspired by regex cheat sheet by ILoveJackDaniels.com that I used to use. Now that great site is known as and has a good collection of free Cheat Sheets, printable quick references for a variety of languages and web technologies.
Favicon generator
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010I just found an useful web favicon generator on-line tool at http://www.favicon.cc/. You can paint your logo with the web tool and download when you are finished. Then just put the favicon.ico file into your webserver directory and you are ready. This on-line tools also support generating favicon from an exiting picture that you can upload to the editor (many picture formats supported). Very useful and easy to use tool. You see the icon you are editing in big size plus a preview how it will look at real size in browser address bar. Read also Wikipedia Favicon article to get the information on different ways you can use your favicon in your web pages.
Universal identification is futile
Saturday, February 6th, 2010Bruce Schneier blog post Anonymity and the Internet has interesting points on Internet security. I can agree many of them.
Universal identification is portrayed by some as the holy grail of Internet security and that anonymity is bad. According to the blog this is not the case. The problem is that universal identification won’t work. Any design of the Internet must allow for anonymity. Universal identification is impossible. Even attribution is impossible. Attempting to build such a system is futile, and will only give criminals and hackers new ways to hide.
Imagine a magic world in which every Internet packet could be traced to its origin. Even in this world, our Internet security problems wouldn’t be solved. Mandating universal identity and attribution is the wrong goal. Accept that there will always be anonymous speech on the Internet. Accept that you’ll never truly know where a packet came from. Work on the problems you can solve: software.
The whole attribution problem is very similar to the copy-protection/digital-rights-management problem. It’s impossible to make specific bits not copyable, it’s impossible to know where specific bits came from. Bits are bits. They don’t naturally come with restrictions on their use attached to them, and they don’t naturally come with author information attached to them. Any attempts to circumvent this limitation will fail. Business model developers and law enforcement and others need to learn understand this.
Sensible web site design
Monday, February 1st, 2010The original idea of http/html was to make it easier to share information between academics, especially report. The idea on the web was that the information is presented in the way that it can be viewed in many ways and using many different devices. On the old days there were both text based and graphical web browsers. Nowadays there are many different computer web browsers and increasing number of mobile devices with different browsing capabilities. The web pages coded using the original ideas work well with wide selection of devices without many extra work, but why so many sites nowadays do not work well with only few web browsers?
Information sharing should still be at the heart of any web site. But why some sites are making it so hard to get even the basic information? It happens too often that on some sites you just can’t get the information unless you have some specific right combination of web browser and all kinds of plug-ins. If the system I need to use at the moment to get the information does not have all of them, there are good chances are I am going to be looking for my information some where else and never come back to that “stupid” site again.
Are web sites today so complicated because they have to be or because they can be? For example, why do I need Flash, Silverlight, or Shockwave, to find where your restaurant is located? Why do I have to download megabytes of wrapper to read a couple of kilobytes of information? Where is the sense in many today’s web designs?
There are certainly place for those multimedia tools, but they should be used in sensible way. For example video sites like YouTube need to use a plugin to play video files (some sites are already experimenting with plug-in free video playback with HTML5 technology). Plug-ins are OK when you need to do things that you can’t do with HTML, but using those plug-ins for doing things that could be done better with just plain old HTML is just plain stupid web design.
Going back to that restaurant site example, if the main page that tells the location of the restaurant is just normal web page written with HTML, it could be read easily with home PC, web kiosk and a multimedia cellular phone. No problem there. If the same information happens to be hidden inside some huge Flash presentation, it is out of reach of the web kiosks, smart-phone browsers and web search engines. Is this good for the business that ordered the web site to promote their business? I think not very good. The Flash only site could be appeal to some people, but leaves out many potential customers not getting even the basic contact information they are looking for. It has happened to me that when I could not access the stupid multimedia web site of one restaurant to get their location information (I was already planned to go there because I had heard it was good), I selected another restaurant I could find.
So when doing a business advertising web site is is essential to think how to present the basic information of the company. A plain old HTML page (does not need to look boring or old fashioned, CSS can do design wonders) where you get basic information and other information you might need. This kind of web page can be viewed with a wide variation of web browsing devices, so all users can get the basic information they are looking for. In addition to that there can all kinds of multimedia presentation pages trying to show how awesome he company is for those who are interested in those (usually they are just waste of time and bandwidth on many sites). The basic information of the company on the web site should be easily accessible or otherwise you will loose business.
As the percentage of web users on non-Flash-capable platforms grows (many mobile platforms), developers who currently create Flash experiences with no fallbacks will have to rethink their strategy and start with the basics before adding a Flash layer. They will need to ensure that content and experience are delivered with or without Flash. Developers always should have done this, but some don’t. The growing percentage of users on non-Flash-capable platforms will be a wake-up call to get the basics right first. Flash won’t die tomorrow, but plug-in technology is on its way out. Most users simply don’t want or can’t install plug-ins to their favorite computer platform. And with HTML5 standard here, the tea leaves are easy to read.
This posting was inspired by web articles Wither the web (site) and Flash, iPad, Standards.
Do not use Internet Explorer
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010The German and French governments have warned web users to find an alternative browser to Internet Explorer to protect security. Microsoft has admitted that IE was the weak link in recent attacks on Google’s systems. That Operation Aurora attack used Chinese malware. This broad attack exploits a new, not publicly known vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Once the malware is downloaded and installed, it opens a back door that allows the attacker to perform reconnaissance and gain complete control over the compromised system.
Microsoft says that the IE browsers’ increased security setting (security zone to “high”) would prevent any serious risk, but German authorities say that even this would not make IE fully safe. This is a vulnerability that was announced in the last couple of days. Microsoft said that all versions of Internet Explorer were affected and there is no patch yet and Microsoft has not given any details of how soon a fix will be released. The risk is lower with more recent releases of its browser, but it is still there. Google IE flaw issue was clearly a PR disaster for Microsoft. Microsoft is hoping that the knee-jerk reaction of France and Germany is not mirrored elsewhere.
So if you are still using IE 6, then it is finally time time to get rid of that very old insecure browser. Any IT professional who is still allowing IE6 to be used in a corporate setting is guilty of malpractice. If you use IE7 or IE8, you should consider to start using a safer web browser because independent research says that IE 7 and 8 can also be exploited.
When you do the change I would recommend to change to Firefox, Opera or Google Chrome. While every browser has its security issues, the alternatives I have given do not have this vulnerability and should be considerable safer alternatives to IE in many other ways as well.
Fading Usenet Newsgroups
Monday, November 9th, 2009Usenet Newsgroups have been great over the past almost twenty years for me. I am finding less and less good posting and always more and more spamming. I fear that we are witnessing the death-rattle of the terminally. The problem is not Usenet newsgroups. Thousands of them are thriving quite nicely today just as they have for decades. The problem is that people do not seem to use them as much as earlier and more spam coming to them.
I still find all the web-based forums to be too primitive. Too often the problems are both user interface and the content (too many forums and too few really good and active). No web-based forum holds a candle to real Usenet. If you only know Usenet through a web-based interface like Google Groups, then you don’t really know Usenet. All web-based forums are dramatically inferior to Usenet.
Likely many of us also use web-based forums for certain specialty topics, particularly forums that are chartered for the discussion of certain hardware and or software, etc. But the Usenet newsgroups continue to be orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than any web-based forum I have seen in 20 years.
Web-based forums are generally HORRID. I avoid them unless absolutely necessary. If you have never used a real Usenet newsreader client and a proper Usenet NNTP server, then you are in no position to judge what is happening to this or any other Usenet newsgroup.
Dive into HTML5
Friday, October 30th, 2009Dive into HTML5: What Does It All Mean is a good overview to new HTML5 techologies and how to use them already today for making normal web pages. I saw this article mentioned at Kenneth Falck’s Blog.
IE6 No More!
Thursday, August 13th, 2009The topic of site support for IE6 has had a lot of discussion on the web recently. Enough is enough. IE6 is an ancient browser released in late 2001. Why would anyone run an eight-year old browser? Should sites continue to support it? What more can anyone do to get IE6 users to upgrade?
IE6 does not support many of the major innovations of the last 8 years. Yet it is still used by 15-25% of Internet users. IE No More website is run by a group of people who want to see IE 6 disappear as soon as possible. The reason is that IE 6 is one of the most difficult and frustrating things web designers have to deal with on a daily basis. The end users also suffer because the insecurity of that old browser compared to new competitors. IEBlog: Engineering POV: IE6 tells the reasons why some organizations and users are still stuck with the old version. But even this blog want people to upgrade to the latest version. Microsoft wants to see IE6 gone as much as anyone else, but the company isn’t going to make the decision for its users anytime soon. Microsoft says that is has committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product. On April 14, 2009, Microsoft retired Mainstream Support for Windows XP, and thus for Internet Explorer 6. That said, Microsoft is not planning to retire Extended Support for the operating system until April 8, 2014.
Of course some big Web sites aren’t waiting for Microsoft. Google’s Orkut (a social networking service popular in Brazil and India) and YouTube have started warning IE6 users that the browser will no longer be supported.
